A dark truth about the bloated mess-about we call sport is that a sudden, savage downfall is as compelling as friction-free success. Think of the boxer on his back, the sprinter choking in an Olympic 100 metres final or the England cricket team at Leeds.

Four years ago, Kevin Pietersen had a sausage named after him, 22.65m watched at least 30 minutes of the long drama, England's Zimbabwean coach was given his British passport the next day and Andrew Flintoff ended up "Off his Fred" in a dream amalgamation of this country's two favourite states: heroic and drunk. Back then, Michael Vaughan's team bounced down to The Oval as masters of their fate, ready to launch a thousand deals and a hubristic bus ride. It was MBEs all round.

England's collapse at Headingley lends this Ashes series a new dynamic, but one no less mesmerising. The 2005 side led the pageant (2-1). With Gary Pratt's assistance, they had beaten Australia in the Trent Bridge Test. You could feel the pull of history's locomotive. Hindsight may be shouting here, but the thrust felt too strong for an Australian counter-strike to succeed. England wore the forcefield of a side who, like the rugby union world cup-winning team of 2003, would somehow find a way to fall over the line in front.

Anyone who has that sense of Andrew Strauss's lot in London this week is advised to adjust their set, or else lay off the helium. As Ricky Ponting said so piercingly on his way out of Leeds: "Some of our guys who had been struggling for a bit of touch are [now] in the best form of their careers, which is great. Everything is heading in the right direction for us at exactly the right time of the tour."

Part of the beauty of smearing a conflict over 25 days is that each man can pass through a whole novel of change in a single summer. Phillip Hughes has lurched from present back to future tense, Shane Watson has reinvented himself as an opening bat, Marcus North has evolved from county nomad to middle-order stoic and Mitchell Johnson's reputation has been born, buried and disinterred since Australia's home and away tussles with South Africa.

This Ashes duel has lacked the melodrama and individual star quality of 2005. Its motif has been a kind of grim intensity. It has been a trial of who might dissolve first. And in that respect it has cast a light on one of the funniest myths in team sports, which is that intimidation is achieved by flexing one's pecs, squeezing the enemy's airspace and boring into his eyes with a gaze that says: "You are entering a world of pain."

"Not tonight, my man," says a character in Richard Price's Lush Life as a New York mugger instructs him to hand it over. Bam goes the gun, down goes our hero. This is what Stuart Broad was saying to Johnson, and others, as Australia's superiority with ball and bat at Leeds began to hurt. Not tonight, my man. But England, and Broad, will have to do a lot better than that, because this is not a staring competition. It is one in which five Australia batsmen have struck seven hundreds compared with England's one.

Justin Langer's emailed assault on the English character is both hilarious and potentially helpful. "England players rarely believe in themselves. Many of them will start and chat a lot, but this is very shallow and again will last [until] the pressure is back on them," wrote Matthew Hayden's fellow former opener to Tim Nielsen, the Australia coach. The next bit might usefully be nailed up in England's dressing room on Thursday morning: "They will retreat very quickly."

The brutality of this phrase is unsurpassable. There is no greater riposte to machismo than a diagnosis of fakery. Any England player who lets this pass without using it to tighten his intestinal resolve should be watching the Oval Test from home. But tough-guy theatre is not what this fifth Test is about, entertaining though it is. It asks England's batsmen to swarm Strauss in his lonely centurion's club and the bowlers not to repeat their double-aberration of banging it in short on a Leeds track that invited swing and a fuller length.

To execute an athletic task in defiance of biting stress is the best form of intimidation yet devised. An ex-pro might ask: how can you know this, having never played in a deciding Ashes Test? The answer: we know precisely because we have never played in a deciding Ashes Test. We know what it takes because what it takes is beyond us. It falls to others, with the talent and the sausages named after them, to win the human struggle of fight v flight.

Time I checked into Sky Sports News rehab

The new Sky Sports News theme tune is faithful to the station's wish to suggest that Judgement Day is here when all that's really happened is that an Algerian guy has signed for Hull.

For those of us looking for a meeting to go to so we can stand up and announce, "Hello, my name's Paul and I'm a Sky Sports News addict", there is only a fortnight to go before another transfer window closes and the "Breaking News" tape no longer rolls with the revelation that Wigan have signed a right-back from Rennes.

Transfer window tug-of-war has been enlivened of late by fierce diplomatic grappling. So many players have had their "heads turned" that you wonder whether the rubber trade has taken over from agents. Everton's Joleon Lescott, David Moyes alleges, has had his head "twisted" by Manchester City. It's getting painful out there.

We need a graduates' fair for football, where acquisitive managers and "wantaway" players can mingle over coffee and digestives. Stop all this head-twisting. For supporters, transfer window angst is almost a medical condition. No day can be a fruitful one unless a new player holding a mobile and a wash-bag speeds into our training ground.

Five reasons to have women's boxing at the Olympic Games

1 If men are allowed to punch each other for medals, women should be too. Hand-to-hand combat for both sexes is already with us in judo and taekwondo. To say boxing is too dangerous for females opens the door to abolitionists. On equality of opportunity alone the case for women's pugilism is unarguable.

2 Britain will sweep the medals board. Our country lacks top Olympic training facilities, but on weekend nights our high streets are practice grounds for keen amateur sluggers. Men are not alone in swinging at one another outside nightclubs called Paradox, Xanadu and Enigma. Channel this oestrogen-rich aggression and it could rain gold at London 2012.

3 If golf and rugby sevens are waved in, how could the IOC turn back 500,000 women boxers in one of the oldest Olympic disciplines?

4 Olympic boxing is safer than the pro version. Headguards, shorter bouts and a points system that rewards shots to a small target area reduce the risk.

Sports personality of the week

Marcus Trescothick deserves a cake from the perspective industry for thinking "hard" about a Test recall but then concluding: "I don't want it enough."

In a world without stress-related illnesses or clinical depression, a car would already be ferrying the 33-year-old Trescothick to the England camp to take Ravi Bopara's place. It's for us, not him, to delude ourselves into thinking there is no greater honour than turning out in an Ashes Test.

Trescothick woke at 6.30am one day last week "from a nightmare" in which he couldn't get his England kit out of his bag and delayed the team. Case closed.